


Kore

by SRdev



Category: Labyrinth (1986)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-06-20
Updated: 2009-06-20
Packaged: 2020-07-30 16:13:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,932
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20099995
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SRdev/pseuds/SRdev
Summary: Sarah has spent an eternity running from Jareth, and she doesn't even know it. Now she lives on the outskirts of the Labryinth. A sort of vauge re-telling of the Persephone myth.





	Kore

**Author's Note:**

> Note from banshee, the archivist: this story was originally archived at [Underground](https://fanlore.org/wiki/Underground_\(Labyrinth_archive\)) and was moved to the AO3 as part of the Open Doors project in 2019. I tried to reach out to all creators about the move and posted announcements, but may not have reached everyone. If you are the creator and would like to claim this work, please contact me using the e-mail address on [Underground’s collection profile](http://archiveofourown.org/collections/underground/profile).

Sarah grew up on the outskirts of the Labyrinth, in a village where the blackberries were always ripe and the apples never were. There was never a fall wind or a first snow, and some part of Sarah yearned for sublime desolation, though she would have never phrased it that way. It was harvest, and the town was like a spinning top almost through it’s last revolution, waiting for a finger to flick it back into motion. That hand was the Goblin King. It was in the moments before he arrived, where autumn almost brushed against the landscape, that Sarah wished she could live forever.

She finished sweeping out the twigs that her younger stepbrother, Tobias, had trodden in as she searched for her stepmother. Opening the door, she stuck her head out into the corn-yellow dusty road beyond. Sarah didn’t see Karine, which meant she was probably with the chickens or the horses in the back yard.  
“Karine!” she yelled.

A pig oinked impetuously, followed by another, much more human grunt. “Sarah, did you finish the sweeping?” A woman with rust hair, and wrinkles like the edge of a piecrust rested one elbow on the top of the fence post.

“Yes. Do you think I would be calling you if I hadn’t?” Sarah stepped outside of the entryway and onto the edge of the pathway closing the door behind her. “Karine,” she said abruptly, although the request had been a long time coming, “May I collect some firewood?”

“Sarah, we already have enough from last year,” Karine’s voice sounded like a rock being drawn over a laundry board. Sometimes Sarah felt bad for the woman; ever since she had joined their family, Karine had been forced to do the most amount of housework by far. “Almost-winter will only going to be a couple of days, and you know that.” Her eyes narrowed. It was almost as if the girl wanted to go into the forest.

“Better safe than sorry,” Sarah retorted, already picking up her skirts and dashing towards the forest.

Mucking out the pigpen one last time, and throwing the pig shit and mud into the old wooden wheelbarrow, Karine muttered to herself, “Better safe than sorry? When did that girl become a poet?”

Sarah sighed into the sunset, watching her breath form little eddies. Ah, she thought, I can taste the air and see my breath. A smile pricked her lips. Beautiful. The tree line had receded again, so it had taken her longer than she would have liked to reach the edge of the wild area, but now that she was here it was worth it. The trees weren’t gnarled and ancient on the edges but she could see the darkness and greenery farther in. It was terrible for firewood, but wonderful for exploring.

She parted the first of the trees with ease, whispering her thanks to the rough bark. Her fingertips lingered on trunks in appreciation. The moss beneath her feet shivered. She recoiled, when the too-cold breeze combed through her hair with its skeletal fingers. She looked around for signs of a wolf or demon, but found none. They lived much deeper in the forest and Sarah had barely even touched a branch.

“Hello,” she called foolishly, realizing immediately after she spoke that if there was something out there she wouldn’t want to alert them further. In her peripheral vision she saw a shock of white above her head, and turned up to look, further but there was only a dark canopy and the occasional patch of out of place sky.  
She turned around looking for the familiar doorway out into the fields, but it was if had closed behind her. Preposterous, of all the woods in the underground this was the least magical, the least sentiment, and most importantly the least dangerous. Although Sarah felt a slight twinge of panic it was tempered slight resentment: why now? There were plenty of times when she went in searching for adventure, but now she simply wanted to take a swim.  
Well if adventure would have her now, so be it. She slowly turned back to the forest, her fists clenching and unclenching. She took a breath and then whooshed it out again. What was that smell? It was like brandy and metal. Then—this time in her right side—the flash of white again, and, close to her face, a soft feeling like a feather. Her blood became pulpy and thick, and her heart had to beat fiercely just to force it through her veins, but she didn’t turn around.  
This was a mistake.

“Are you lost?” a whisper just next to her other ear, the one not touched by the feather. The voice was gentle tenor, and it was only its kindness that kept her from screaming. She turned, expecting the owner of the voice to be next to her, touching her even, but there was only a stray shaft of sunlight.  
She looked around wildly, her hair tickling the back of her neck with each twist of her head. She bit her lip and narrowed her eyes. “But these woods are bereft of magic! There is no magic here.” She whispered herself angrily. It wasn’t fair.  
“Precisily.” The gentleness from the voice was gone and it was practically a hiss. Sarah jumped, and on her descent her foot caught on a root. She stumbled to the forest floor, leaves and dirt crowded into her mouth and skin. And it was then she noticed the boots. They were dragonhide, or some other foreign leather, and shown even in the shadows.  
A couple feet away stood the owner of the boots, a man. That much she had guessed from his voice, and that was still all she could tell. The shadows seemed to contort him, and in response the light bent toward her, blinding her at the same time.

She stood up brushing herself off, and feeling herself for new bruises. “Who are you?” She tasted electricity and lightening and, for a second, darkness. But then it was gone, replaced by the sensation of dirt on her tongue.

“Ah now, that would be telling.” She couldn’t quite tell, but there was a slight edge to his voice, almost if he was mocking her.

She stepped closer, but like the horizon he moved back. “I’m not lost, I’m exploring.”

“It’s not exploring if you already know the forest, Sarah.” Like a fairy light, the shadows danced away for just a second, revealing half a smile, and a glimpse of a canine. Maybe she had met a wolf in the forest, she mused.

“Or are you perhaps,” his tongue lingered over the word, capturing it, petting it, and then letting it go, “avoiding preparation for the festival?”

She narrowed her eyes and sidestepped out of the light so that her eyed could adjust. “Where have we met?” His voice fit upon her ears so well, even while she was frightened, even while she felt some strange kind of glitter settling upon her skin. Magic was dangerous.

“We haven’t.” Suddenly all edges were gone from his voice and it was pure warning, pure shadow. Liquid lightning.

A baby, she remembered the image of a baby. He was crying and wouldn’t stop. But she had always seen children for the curse they were. Maybe it was his child that she saw. His child had probably been the one the Goblin King chose last year, and now he was hiding in the woods. “There’s no shame in it, you know,” she thought him stupid to have a child in the first place, but she understood.

A strand of golden hair like a stray sunbeam, or maybe it was one she couldn’t tell. “No, Princess Sarah, I’d say it’s a great deal of a shame that we haven’t met before.”

Her brow exploded into a crease. “Princess?” Perhaps this man was madder than she had originally thought. “Listen, I am terribly sorry he took your child, but it’s not your fault- I promise. He’s evil, he has no soul, and there was nothing you could do.”

The air turned colder instantly, as if all the sun he had been saving up was suddenly lost, drained into the damp earth. She did not shiver, instead embracing the long awaited cold. She cocked her head at him. “Please don’t be angry, I don’t know what’s happened to you in here, but I’m sure that we’ll all accept you back with open arms.” Open arms, she thought, what a strange expression, she had never heard it used before in the village, but it just seemed to fall off her lips like a shooting star.

“No soul?” the voice was dead. He continued haltingly as if his words were water sliding through a great solid stone, “he has breath, heart, blood, but no soul? He has the least flesh and the most magic that the world has ever seen and yet no soul.” The next words were gnashed, like a dog biting at a bit, not content only to consume, but with a desire to disfigure. “You know nothing,” and then a smile, but this time she could see at least three fourths of it, a lip pulled taut over glimmering white teeth, “he has a thousand souls. And what of you? What divinity has given you the power of judgment girl? I know who has given me mine. ”

“I-I’m sorry,” she stammered. Perhaps he wasn’t some refugee. All of her breath was squeezed out of her by the next thought. What if he was a spy? “Please, I didn’t mean it.”

“That is not an answer.” From the darkness a hand, gloved, and then the glove being pulled tight across his fingertips. “Tick tock.”

A clock turned back, a labyrinth, thirteen hours. The images shifted before her until she found the words she wanted. “He took Darren.” The words had once again spilled from her lips, and she blushed slightly embarrassed. The name faded and died in the air, trembling and insignificant, and it was only this that compelled her to continue, to explain. “We were friends, playmates. I know it’s silly to get attached, I know it’s a price we pay. But please,” she whined, looking for just one glimpse of him, “it hurts still. It’s silly, I know. I’m silly, please forgive me.”

A twig cracked under the tip of his boot, and she was expecting him to curse her or leave, but instead he laughed, a warm laugh like fog or colored smoke. “The Goblin King is evil because he took your playmate, your friend off to his castle, to serve him as an advisor?”

“You know of him? You see him?” She asked desperately, giving up all pretense of stillness and rushing towards him.

He of course had already moved and this time his voice was behind her. “The exit’s this way, little Sarah.”

“Please, I beg of you, tell me is he well, happy?”

He growled. “Is he well? Is he happy?” he mocked. It was the same gentle tenor but warped somehow, broken in a disturbing way. “He is more content than you could have ever made him Sarah.”

And then he was gone. There was no sound, no change in smell but somehow she knew because the world felt lighter, warmer. But it was all a façade, tearing through the brush she ran after his shadow, or where the shadows had warped around him at least. But she only ended up in the field, staring at a setting sun.


End file.
